Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Whose King Is This Anyway?

A common theme in the three lessons appointed for this day is the manifestation of God to people outside the religious community. Isaiah reminds the community of its call to be a light to the nations and destroys the separation between internal and external forces.

St Paul in Ephesians suggests that the ultimate purpose of God is the unification of humanity in a truly multicultural community where all distinctions between "insiders" and "outsiders" have vanished.

Mark reminds us that such distinctions began to erode with the coming of Christ, who was revealed to some who were thought to be “outsiders” and paradoxically rejected by many who believed they were the "insiders." This was a bitter lesson for early believers, who at first were all Jewish and who knew that they were the elect of God — the shocking idea that impure Gentiles were, from God's perspective, on equal footing with them.

Jesus abolishes not only the barriers of nation, race and ethnicity. He also transcends the boundaries of gender, religion, economics and social stratification, for in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28); the magi were only the tip of a very big iceberg.